This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
A time of turbulence is one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities. One constant theme is, therefore, the need for the decision maker in the individual enterprise to face up to reality and resist the temptation of what "everybody knows," the temptations of the certainties of yesterday, which are about to become of deleterious superstitions of tomorrow. To manage in turbulent times, therefore, means to face up to the new realities. It means starting with the question: "What is the world really like?" rather than the assertions or assumptions that made sense only a few years ago.
Decision | Exploit | Individual | Means | Need | Opportunity | Reality | Sense | Temptation | Time | World | Temptation |
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Ecological footprint analysis has gained considerable momentum around the world as both heuristic device and practical method for assessing sustainability. This success derives in part from methodological strengths of EFA that are both scientifically well founded and reflect thinking people’s intuitive sense of reality. On the technical/scientific side, EFA has several qualities that reinforce its credibility as a sustainability indicator. The method: acknowledges that humans are biophysical entities that make constant metabolic demands on their supportive ecosystems and that all our manufactured capital and related cultural artefacts impose a parallel and much larger industrial metabolism on the ecosphere; recognizes the crucial role of natural capital and natural income (biophysical stocks and flows) in economic development and sustainability; accepts that the economy is a fully contained, growing, dependent, sub-system of the non-growing ecosphere; recognizes the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate governor of material transformations and economic activity (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1991) and that beyond a certain (optimal) scale, the growth and maintenance human enterprise must necessarily accelerate the entropic disordering and dissipation of the ecosphere; is closely related conceptually to Odum’s the embodied energy (emergy) analyses (see Hall 1995) and the ‘environmental space’ concept of the Sustainable Europe Campaign (Carley and Spapens 1998). accounts for both population size and resource consumption in estimating of appropriated ecosystem area. This aligns EFA closely with Catton’s (1980) concept of human ‘load’ (population times per capita consumption); corresponds closely to and incorporates all the factors in Ehrlich’s and Holdren’s (1971) well-known definition of human impact on the environment: I = PAT, where ‘I’ is impact, ‘P’ is population, ‘A’ is affluence (i.e., level of consumption) and ‘T’ is a technology scalar.
Energy | Growth | Law | Method | Qualities | Sense | Size | Success | Technology | Thinking | World |
Ralph A. Habas, fully Ralph Alfred Habas
A primary requirement in every enterprise in habit-formation is self-confidence.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
The fact is that consumption is limited by nature's reproductive capacity--over-consumption today means less natural capital and lower natural income tomorrow. This, in turn, may force future generations to accelerate the downward spiral as they erode remaining stocks of natural capital to meet their own consumption needs. In other words, life on Earth (including human life) can be sustained only within the limits of the dividends nature pays on our remaining stocks and future investments in natural capital. ...sustainability requires that the human enterprise remain within global carrying capacity.
Earth | Force | Future | Global | Life | Life | Means | Nature |
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Abstract | Cause | Government | Question | Stupidity | Will | Government |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Government enterprise is the most inefficient and costly way of producing jobs.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Meanwhile, in the broad and lofty chamber set apart for occasions of import, the Abbot himself was pacing impatiently backwards and forwards, with his long white nervous hands clasped in front of him. His thin, thought-worn features and sunken, haggard cheeks bespoke one who had indeed beaten down that inner foe whom every man must face, but had none the less suffered sorely in the contest. In crushing his passions he had well-nigh crushed himself.
The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)
I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.
Value |
He hath willed everything that may be for our good, if we perform the condition he hath required; and hath put it upon record, that we may know it and regulate our desires and supplications according to it. If we will not seek him, his immutability cannot be a bar, but our own folly is the cause; and by our neglect we despoil him of this perfection as to us, and either imply that he is not sincere, and means not as he speaks; or that he is as changeable as the wind, sometimes this thing, sometimes that, and not at all to be confided in. If we ask according to his revealed will, the unchangeableness of his nature will assure us of the grant; and what a presumption would it be in a creature dependent upon his sovereign, to ask that which he knows he has declared his will against; since there is no good we can want, but he hath promised to give, upon our sincere and ardent desire for it.
Conquest | Doctrine | Folly | Illusion | Reason | Thought | Weakness | World | Thought |
The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.
Conservation | Defeat | Efficiency | Government | Knowledge | Problems | Public | Regret | Government |
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security… But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Better |
The human character, we believe, requires in general constant and immediate control to prevent its being biased from right by the seductions of self-love.
Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honorably conducted? God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy; the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
Thomas Cronin, fully Thomas Edward Cronin
The essence of the leader as artist is consciousness-raising and unlocking the energies and talents of fellow associates. Leaders at their best are not involved in doing great deeds so much as getting their followers to believe they can do great deeds and excel. Leaders define and defend and promote values. Or they help redefine values, and understand when, in Lincoln’s phrase, the dogmas of the past are inadequate for the stormy present. They understand when new circumstances call for new vision. Leaders are skilled listeners and learners, carefully consulting their own and their colleagues’ values, beliefs, and passions. As important as anything else, a leader has to nurture trust and self-confidence. Associates and followers expect leaders to have bold visions and to pursue them with enthusiasm. People being led yearn for a mission or vision that is clearly stated.
Goals | People | Purpose | Purpose | Work | Leadership | Understand |